Transcript

Payal: Very often one reads and hears about the sudden spurt in the growth of international schools in India, do you feel that there has been a sudden spurt in the recent years?

Lalage: Yes there has.

Payal: What do you feel is the single most important cause for this spurt?

Lalage: Its been globalisation, because pre globalisation it was not permitted to run schools with international curriculum in India. There wouldn’t even have been the clientele. Globalisation has meant that a lot of foreigners have come into the country and the existing schools, which were embassy based, no longer had enough space for all the children.

So, globalisation created the need plus the permission to open such schools in India. That’s why it happened in a rush. The need may well have been there before.

Payal: There was a time not too long ago when the mention of international education in India conjured up images of the British School, The American Embassy School and the Woodstock School.  How is this new breed of international schools like Pathways and Lancers International School that you have nurtured and you are continuing to nurture; how are they different from their embassy predecessors?

Lalage: I think the Embassy predecessors, the schools that were here before, were very caught up within the area from where they derived their curriculum. Take the British School – it followed the British Curriculum, it expected a kind of British expat community to join the school.  The American Embassy School is very American, the curriculum is very American and so Americans were expected to go there. Woodstock was slightly different because it has definitely had a great mix but again it was based on American curriculum.

I think the new schools, because the ownership is Indian, they are looking to provide a school that is different to the school that is normally found – the national school. They are also to some extent looking to profit – so that is different.  And they have no obvious international group that they are affiliated with and the majority of their students will be Indian nationals. So there are much stronger Indian links to these schools than there were to the previous schools.

Payal: And this increase in the number of Indian nationals enrolling in these new international schools would also be, primarily, because of globalisation as you mentioned earlier?

Lalage: Partly because of globalisation, partly because of the much wider instance of Indian students moving overseas for their tertiary education and this idea of doing, at least, grade eleven and twelve in an international school in India is being perceived as a kind of bridge between the national system, learning a bit about global systems and then moving onto your university overseas.

Payal: Out of the many international curricula, which one do you think, is the most holistic as a learning experience?

Lalage: It has to be the International Baccalaureate because if you look at the plan of how the curriculum works it is centred on the learner; and from that learner profile does everything stem out. Its not looking at subjects, its not looking at knowledge; its looking at the learner, so it is more holistic.

Payal: Right, I think you make a point there, a major point.  Because if you look at International Baccalaureate, the early years program that they have – the PYP is a very trans-disciplinary program.  The disciplines are not as important as the learner and a holistic picture of learning that they have through these trans-disciplinary themes.

Payal: What are your views about a single syllabus throughout India, across the states and national boards?

Lalage: I think that it is something that probably would work very well for subjects like maths and science, which are the kind of subjects that build.  You start at a certain level when you first start school and every year you are building onto and using what you have learned before as you get onto the next stage. Other subjects need flexibility because India is a vast country – every state is different – and they need to incorporate regional differences into their syllabi.

Payal:  What are the challenges of setting up a truly international school in India? You have been instrumental in setting up two of the major international schools in North India. In your experiences what were the outstanding challenges when you were setting up these schools?

Lalage: I am not sure whether it is only in international schools, but I think that the biggest challenge is teachers.  Finding the right kind of teachers, teachers with the type of open mindedness that they need to take on something new and then teach it. Another one is trying to meet Indian university requirements and teaching international curriculum at the same time and the third one might be educating parents to understand what you are trying to do,so that they feel secure that even though what you are trying to do is different, their child is not being compromised in any way through some kind of experiment that they perhaps feel you are carrying out.

Payal: Right, the teachers and the parents are such a crucial part of that learning community around the student that, yes, they need to be on board and they need to be thinking along the same lines as the school envisions itself to go.

Payal: Are international schools posing any kind of threat, real or perceived, to the schools following national curriculum?

Lalage: I don’t think there are enough international schools to pose a threat, either real or perceived. What I think it has done is that it has contributed to national schools working harder to improve practices. So I think, actually, it is having a positive effect on national schools and some national boards are looking at their own curricula and are reviewing them and not just sitting back and saying its done now and the same thing is going to carry on forever and ever.  There has been a huge change in, for example, the way CBSE is looking at education and a lot of this has come from looking at international education.

Payal: There is a perception in some cities like Gurgaon, Bangalore, Hyderabad,where you have a sizable number of international schools following international curricula, that there has been a shift and there has been a movement of teachers from the national to the international schools. The national schools are finding it difficult to replace those teachers who had been trained, who had gained a certain level of maturity and understanding and experience and then they leave that school and move to an international school primarily because of the perks and the salary that the international schools can afford to pay.

Lalage: I am not sure whether it is the perks necessarily or the salary necessarily. The fact is that there are not enough teachers. The problem is teachers and its there anyway whether you have the international schools or not – finding enough good teachers to man your schools. Teachers who are looking to grow, they will move towards something that is different, because they want to experience something new and I think it is that which draws them more than the salary itself, salary of course is important. But I also know teachers who have gone into international education, learned a lot and then have decided to go back into the national system, perhaps in an administrative role than as a classroom teacher. This cross-pollination is, perhaps, a very good thing to happen.

Payal: And it is the sharing of good practices from one to the other and like you said it is bringing about an improvement and a change in the way national schools are thinking and working.

Payal: Thank you very much for your time and for sharing those pearls of wisdom.

Lalage: Thanks to you too.

X-X-X

Ms. Lalage Prabhu is the former Principal of the British School (New Delhi). She is also the Founder-Director of Pathways World School and was instrumental in establishing their IB program. She is currently advising Lancers International School on curriculum and school improvement.

Courtsey: TED

See this video from 4 years ago for an outlook on the issues raised by technology including expectations from it. The issues and expectations are much the same today, but the world seems to have moved much closer to achieving the desired goals.

It is now a question of when, rather than if (digitized, customised and individualised textbooks will replace ordinary physical text-books)

Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

Courtsey: TED

Most importantly, the videos are simple enough and interesting enough use as educational resources to teach kids the ABC of brainstorming, effectively.

How not to brainstorm

1. Play it safe
2. Be careful what you say (judge your own ideas)
3. Go for a single good idea (Pro’s only need one idea)
4. Kill stupid ideas
5. Don’t listen to other’s ideas (mine are better)
6. Don’t take notes (rely on memory)
7. Details, details… (I have been busy thinking this one through)

Brainstorming Rules

1. Capture all the ideas
2. Encourage wild ideas
3. Defer all judgement (on other people’s ideas and your own)
4. Build off the ideas of others
5. Be visual (draw, be graphical)
6. One conversation at a time
7. Headline ideas (reserve details for discussion)
8. Go for quantity

1. You will not marry during the term of your contract
2. You are not to keep company with men
3. You must be home between the hours of 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. unless attending a school function
4. You may not loiter downtown in ice-cream stores
5. You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you have the permission of the board
6. You may not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man unless he is your father or brother
7. You may not smoke cigarettes
8. You may not dress in bright colors
9. You may under no circumstances dye your hair
10. You must wear at least two petticoats
11. Your dresses must not be shorter than two inches above the ankle
12. To keep the schoolroom neat and clean, you must: sweep the floor at least once daily; scrub the floor at least once a week with hot, soapy water; clean the blackboards at least once a day; and start the fire at 7am so the room will be warm at 8am

As my inquisitive nature got the better of me, I decided to find out how New Zealand’s teacher regulations had evolved over the last 100 years. Hoping that the internet might bring me joy, I was again surprised to find the above (or similar) so called rules of conduct attributable to the teaching profession in more countries that one. Not finding any authentic source to confirm if the above prescriptive rules did indeed enjoy any degree of authority at any time (sic there was no internet in 1915), it seems that the rules may be a product of a humorous person’s highly active imagination.

Having no cause to continue with my quest to find out more about New Zealand teacher regulations, I decided to post these rules here with the hope that it will evoke a smile and raise some brows.

There is a message here – one should not assume that all information one comes across is accurate / correct – even in academic literature.

Do let me know if you have come across instances where the information made available to you, though seemingly from a credible source or having been paid for by you was inaccurate or misleading.

In my next blog, I will write about the new set of problems being created by information explosion and the new skills required by the users of such information.

Featured Book

Author: Dr. Nyla Ali Khan
Associate Professor
University of Nebraska-Kearney

Let me say at the very outset that this is a much-needed perspective on a region that has come to exemplify conflict per se, thus crowding out all time-honored allusions to bahisht reverberating in the Mughal Emperor Jehangir’s eulogy, “if there is paradise anywhere on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.” For more than six decades now Kashmir has been one of the most conflict-ridden regions in South Asia.

Nyla Ali Khan is the grand-daughter of Sheikh Abdullah, the first Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. It is thus no surprise that the author offers us a uniquely etic, as also emic perception, her social location provides both the rationale and the commitment, and she does an excellent job of walking the tight rope. She states the context and her intent in the preface itself. “I belong to Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), a highly volatile South Asian region with rich reservoirs of cultural, social and human wealth… Despite my emotional investment in the issue, I have tried to veer away from the seductive trap of either romanticizing or demonizing certain political actors and initiatives”. [ix-x] She is not wary of treading controversial terrain and she claims the Kashmiri ‘national identity’ is a composite collective one, emerging from the silence of a people “…Caught between the rival siblings India and Pakistan….”[ix]

More

Reviewed by:
Jaskiran Mathur, Ph.D.
Chair Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice
St. Francis College, Brooklyn NY ]]> http://artoflearning.in/nyla-ali-khan/feed/ 0 http://artoflearning.in/nyla-ali-khan/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ArtOfLearning/~3/PfK_qztsww4/ http://artoflearning.in/derek-sivers-weird-or-just-different/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:04:49 +0000 sandeep http://artoflearningvideos.wordpress.com/?p=130 “There’s a flip side to everything,” the saying goes, and in 2 minutes, Derek Sivers shows this is true in a few ways you might not expect.

Courtsey: TED

That’s nothing short of an achievement, if you consider the fact that I had to read the manual to figure out how to use the gadget, while my wife pushed and pulled for a lot longer time than my son.

Here is my assessment on why kids take naturally to technology:

1. Today’s children are born into technology. Technology is all around them and they grow up interacting with technical devices – TV, DVD players, computers, phones, music systems to name a few devices that are commonly found around the house. My son has played with and used all devices that he can lay his hands on. Every night, before he sleeps, he has to punch the keys on the computer and write a make-believe document. He prefers this activity to writing on paper. In fact, that’s where he reinforces visual recognition of letters and knows the exact position/function of all the keys.  He can move the mouse with precision and format text with different colours, fonts and font sizes.

It seems to me, that he will be more comfortable typing than with writing.

2. Children are naturally inquisitive. They are not burdened with prior knowledge.  As adults we become accustomed to doing thing in a particular manner.  Our first reaction to something new is to test our prior knowledge and if something does not conform to our existing schema, we are at a loss.

This is not the case with kids.  They will push and pull, touch and jab till they figure it out.  If a particular method does not work, they try something new. They have all the perseverance and determination in the world.

3. Children do not carry the baggage of fear. Fear is one of the biggest reasons why us adults produce sub-optimal results – fear of failure, fear of damaging, fear of doing something that will result in additional costs, etc. Will it break if I press this button? Will I connect to the internet, which will result in additional costs? Will I dial the number of some unknown person? etc.

Kids when they set out to do a task, they display all the creativity in the world because they are not thinking about the consequences. The only thing that limits a child in his interaction with technology is his environment and interest. 

But are these characteristics of children restricted to technology alone? No they are not.  Children’s interactions with people & materials are based on their natural instincts that are hardwired into them.  As we grow older, some of these natural instincts get suppressed, due to control and compliance.

As caregivers and teachers, we should nurture and enhance these natural instincts, within reasonable parameters of safety. It is a grave injustice to them to burden them with the baggage we adults have grown accustomed to carry.